15 Minutes With...Joel Confino, CEO, Haydle Enterprise Q&A

Over the past year or two we’ve seen a surprising increase in the number of different types of technologies and services touting their ability to address various areas of customer, employee and distributor partner engagement – from leadership, coaching, assessment and communications to collaboration, innovation, rewards & recognition and analysis.

The Haydle Enterprise Q&A platform is a simple, new approach to knowledge management designed to accelerate an organization’s progress by giving everyone the power to ask and answer questions. These questions can relate to anything about the company. If a question has already been answered, the advanced search engine is designed to find it. If it hasn’t, the system is designed to route the question to the right expert within the organization.

Haydle CEO Joel Confino explains that Haydle has two main benefits – engagement and capturing tribal knowledge. “Questions get asked over and over again, but information gets lost,” he says. “There’s a productivity and efficiency issue of not keeping track of people who know. Eighty percent of information is in people’s heads.”

Confino notes that the workflow of documenting knowledge is difficult and no one wants to do it. “People don’t want to spend time writing down their expertise – they’re already scheduled to the edge of their lives.” He talks about the wave of wikis and other innovation strategies that began about a decade ago that people thought would work, but says they in fact didn’t provide enough benefits to engage the participants. “As a result, there was a drop-off in interest in these types of strategies until recently, with the emergence of social media. Almost every major company has an enterprise social network like Yammer, Connections, Jive, whatever. Our personal view is that these have struggled as well. They seem like a good idea, but then one has to ask what benefit they really provide to the people using them. Are companies trying to use social media tools for things they really weren’t designed to do?”

Knowledge management used to be about managing documents, Confino says. “Today it’s about connecting people. The way you find info, it’s not about finding docs. It’s about connecting with the expert.” Ironically, he notes, engagement tools often aren’t actually engaging. “The only way to evaluate their effectiveness is to measure not only usage, but bottom line results.”

Confino says the Haydle technology is as much about engagement as it is about knowledge management. It contributes to engagement by:

Giving everyone a voice – fostering involvement by leveling the playing field in terms of the ability to participate.

Building trust – giving participants the ability to validate responses to create a climate of cooperation instead of competition. The Haydle platform, he says, is designed to enable people to enhance their internal reputations.

Promoting a gift culture, one in which people take pleasure in helping and thanking one another.

Creating a positive mood by enabling people throughout the organization to take pleasure in contributing a solution or to thank someone else for doing so.